Cystic fibrosis hetero- and homozygosity is associated with inhibition of breast cancer growth

Abstract

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is the most common lethal recessive genetic disease of the Caucasian population. Although reports of cancer frequency in CF have emphasized an elevated observed-to-expected ratio of 6.5 for digestive tract cancers, these studies also show a significantly decreased observed-to-expected ratio for other malignancies including breast cancer. The cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) functions as an ATP channel. We found that heterozygous and homozygous CFTR knockout mice had elevated blood ATP concentrations. Elevated extracellular ATP is known to inhibit tumor growth in vivo and in vitro. Using double mutant mice created by F2 generation crosses of CFTR knockout and nude mice, we observed reduced breast tumor implantability in CFTR homozygous nude animals. Decreased tumor growth rate was observed in both CFTR heterozygous and homozygous nude animals. Extracellular ATP reduced human breast tumor cell growth rate in vitro, and a breast tumor transfected with human CFTR that had high extracellular ATP concentrations in vitro correspondingly had a slower growth rate in vivo. The results suggest that both CFTR heterozygosity and homozygosity suppress breast cancer growth and that elevated extracellular ATP can account for this phenomenon.